atmospheric electricity
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Wikidata facts
- Subclass of
- meteorological phenomenon
- Image
- Lightning over Oradea Romania 3.jpg
Show 4 more facts
- topic's main category
- Category:Atmospheric electricity
- Commons category
- Atmospheric electricity
- Dewey Decimal Classification (works and editions)
- 551.563
- topic has template
- Template:Atmospheric electricity
via Wikidata · CC0
~18 min read
Encyclopedic overview
Cloud-to-ground lightning. Typically, lightning discharges 30,000 amperes, at up to 100 million volts, and emits light, radio waves, x-rays and even gamma rays. Plasma temperatures in lightning can approach 28,000 kelvins.
Atmospheric electricity describes the electrical charges in the Earth's atmosphere (or that of another planet). The movement of charge between the Earth's surface, the atmosphere, and the ionosphere is known as the global atmospheric electrical circuit. Atmospheric electricity is an interdisciplinary topic with a long history, involving concepts from electrostatics, atmospheric physics, meteorology and Earth science.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “atmospheric electricity” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.